Category: project_proposal

I am researching the growth of men’s interest in fashion because I want to know if social media has had any impact on this trend. Formerly a female-oriented interest, there has been a greater increase in male fashion consumers within recent years as well as an abandonment in traditional norms for men’s clothing. I want to create a timeline which shows the shifts in men’s fashion over the years and compare it to another timeline of Google searches to see if there are any correlations.

For data, I will be using Google Trends and Google Finance. With Google Trends, I will be able to compare interest peaks and lows for search terms relating to men’s fashion. With Google Finance, I will be able to track stock prices owned by fashion groups over the past 15 years. Both of these tools are free, easy to access, and easy to pull data from and import into a visualizing tool. Knight Lab’s JS Timeline would be used as my timeline-builder for images and text.

My topic is a very design-based topic which would make sense to use a digital platform to see images, videos, and articles. However, analytics, especially stock analytics, have a variety of factors and correlation might not always equal causation. While I would be able to visually show changing aesthetics in men’s fashion, it would be difficult to say that this is simply because more men are interested in fashion.

I would imagine many #menswear bloggers on Instagram and YouTube, male fashion forums, and generally anyone who is interested in fashion would enjoy seeing my data. I’m heavily involved on several fashion related forums such as Reddit, KanyeToThe, and Styleforum which could also be hubs for sharing.